Art historians andphilosophers of art have long hadclassificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particularcultural artifact or manmade object should be classified asart. Disputes continue about what does and does not count as art.[1][failed verification]
Defining art can be difficult.Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition,art (from theLatinars, meaning "skill" or "craft") is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as "liberal arts" and "martial arts". However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, "art" is commonly understood to be skill used to produce anaesthetic result.[2]
Britannica Online defines it as "a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination".[3] But how best to define the term "art" today is a subject of much contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term "art".[4][5]Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 "It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more." It is not clear who has the right to define art. Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other's.
The second, more narrow, more recent sense of the word "art" is roughly as an abbreviation forcreative art or "fine art." Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities. Often, if the skill is being used to create objects with a practical use, rather than paintings or sculpture with no practical function other than as anartwork, it will be considered as falling under classifications such as thedecorative arts,applied art andcraft rather than fine art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considereddesign instead of art. Some thinkers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference.[6] The modern distinction does not work well for older periods, such asmedieval art, where the most highly regarded art media at the time were oftenmetalwork,engraved gems,textiles and other "applied arts", and the perceived value of artworks often reflected the cost of the materials and sheer amount of time spent creating the work at least as much as the creative input of the artist.
In theZhou dynasty of ancient China, excellence in theliù yì (六藝), or "Six Arts", was expected of thejunzi (君子), or "perfect gentleman", as defined by philosophers likeConfucius. Because these arts spanned both thecivil andmilitary aspects of life, excelling in all six required a scholar to be very well-rounded andpolymathic. The Six Arts were as follows:
Later in the history of imperial China, the Six Arts were pared down, creating a similar system offour arts for thescholar-officialcaste to learn and follow:
Another attempt to systematically define art as a grouping of disciplines in antiquity is represented by theancient GreekMuses. Each of the standard nine Muses symbolized and embodied one of nine branches of what the Greeks calledtechne, a term which roughly means "art" but has also been translated as "craft" or "craftsmanship", and the definition of the word also included more scientific disciplines. These nine traditional branches were:
Inmedieval Christian Europe,universities taught a standard set of sevenliberal arts, defined by early medieval philosophers such asBoethius andAlcuin of York and as such centered around philosophy. The definitions of these subjects and their practice was heavily based on the educational system of Greece and Rome. These seven arts were themselves split into two categories:
At this time, and continuing after theRenaissance, the word "art" in English and its cognates in other languages had not yet attained their modern meaning. One of the first philosophers to discuss art in the framework we understand today wasGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who described in hisLectures on Aesthetics a ranking of the five major arts from most material to most expressive:
Hegel's listing of the arts caught on particularly in France, and with continual modifications the list has remained relevant and a subject of debate in French culture into the 21st century. This classification was popularized byRicciotto Canudo, an early scholar of film who wrote "Manifesto of the Seventh Art" in 1923. The epithets given to each discipline by its placement of the list are often used to refer to them through paraphrase, particularly with calling film "the seventh art". The FrenchMinistry of Culture often participates in the decision making for defining a "new" art.[7] The ten arts are generally given as follows:
The ongoing dispute over what should constitute the next form of art has been fought for over a century. Currently, there are a variety of contenders forle onzième art, many of which are older disciplines whose practitioners feel that their medium is underappreciated as art. One particularly popular contender for the 11th ismultimedia, which is intended to bring together the ten arts just as Canudo argued that cinema was the culmination of the first six arts.Performance art, as separate from the performing arts, has been calledle douzième, or "twelfth", art.[9]
The traditional Western classifications since the Renaissance have been variants of thehierarchy of genres based on the degree to which the work displays the imaginative input of the artist, using artistic theory that goes back to the ancient world. Such thinking received something of a boost with theaesthetics ofRomanticism. A similar theoretical framework applied in traditionalChinese art; for example in both the Western and Far Eastern traditions oflandscape painting (seeliterati painting),imaginary landscapes were accorded a higher status than realistic depictions of an actual landscape view – in the West relegated to "topographical views".
Many have argued that it is a mistake to even try to define art or beauty, that they have no essence, and so can have no definition. Often, it is said that art is a cluster of related concepts rather than a single concept. Examples of this approach includeMorris Weitz andBerys Gaut. Drawing onLudwig Wittgenstein, Weitz argued that art is an "open concept" whose constituents and criteria for inclusion could change over time;[10] he also sought to distinguish purely "descriptive" from "evaluative" uses of the term art.[11]
Another approach is to say that "art" is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums, and artists get away with is considered art regardless of formal definitions. Thisinstitutional theory of art has been championed byGeorge Dickie. Most people did not consider a store-boughturinal or a sculptural depiction of aBrillo Box to be art untilMarcel Duchamp andAndy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., theart gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the values that define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it "art", not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. ForJohn Dewey, for instance, a writer's intent to call a writing a "poem" should control, whether other poets acknowledge it or not. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem.
Leo Tolstoy in his seminal 1898 textWhat is Art?, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator.[12] Functionalists, likeMonroe Beardsley argue that whether a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context. For instance, the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure).
PhilosopherDavid Novitz has argued that disagreements about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem, rather that "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art."[13] According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about our values and where we are trying to go with our society than they are about theory proper.
On the other hand,Thierry de Duve[14] argues that disputes about the definition of art are a necessary consequence ofMarcel Duchamp's presentation of areadymade as a work of art. In his 1996 bookKant After Duchamp he reinterprets Kant'sCritique of Judgement exchanging the phrase "this is beautiful" with "this is art", using Kantian aesthetics to address post-Duchampian art.
The work of the French artistMarcel Duchamp from the 1910s and 1920s paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works (thereadymades, for instance) that defied previous categorisations. Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s. The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Early "concept" artists likeHenry Flynt,Robert Morris andRay Johnson influenced the later, widely accepted movement of conceptual artists likeDan Graham,Hans Haacke, andDouglas Huebler.
More recently, the "Young British Artists" (YBAs), led byDamien Hirst, came to prominence in the 1990s and their work is seen as conceptual, even though it relies very heavily on the art object to make its impact. The term is used in relation to them on the basis that the object is not the artwork, or is often afound object, which has not needed artistic skill in its production.Tracey Emin is seen as a leading YBA and a conceptual artist, even though she has denied that she is and has emphasised personal emotional expression.
Charles Saatchi fundsDamien Hirst. The following year, theSaatchi Gallery exhibits Hirst'sThe Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.
Vanessa Beecroft holds a performance inMilan,Italy. Here, young girls act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food.
Tracey Emin is nominated for theTurner Prize. Her workMy Bed consisted of her disheveled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers.
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Martin Creed wins the Turner Prize for accurately titledWork No. 227: The lights going on and off, in which lights turned on and off in an otherwise empty room.[15]
Miltos Manetas confronts the Whitney Biennial with his Whitneybiennial.com.[16]
Simon Starling wins the Turner Prize forShedboatshed. Starling presented a wooden shed which he had converted into a boat, floated down theRhine, then remade into a shed.[17]
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TheStuckist group of artists, founded in 1999, proclaimed themselves "pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts." They also called it pretentious, "unremarkable and boring" and on 25 July 2002, in ademonstration, deposited a coffin outside theWhite Cube gallery, marked "The Death of Conceptual Art".[18][19] In 2003, theStuckism International Gallery exhibited a preserved shark under the titleA Dead Shark Isn't Art, clearly referencing the Damien Hirst work (see disputes above).[20]
In a BBC2Newsnight programme on 19 October 1999 hosted byJeremy Paxman withCharles Thomson attacking that year's Turner Prize and artistBrad Lochore defending it, Thomson was displaying Stuckist paintings, while Lochore had brought along a plastic detergent bottle on a cardboard plinth. At one stage Lochore states, "if people say it's art, it's art". Paxman asks, "So you can say anything is art?" and Lochore replies, "You could say everything is art..." At this point Thomson, off-screen, can be heard to say, "Is my shoe art?" while at the same time his shoe appears in front of Lochore, who observes, "If you say it is. I have to judge it on those terms." Thomson's response is, "I've never heard anything so ludicrous in my life before."[21]
In 2002,Ivan Massow, the Chairman of theInstitute of Contemporary Arts branded conceptual art "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and in "danger of disappearing up its own arse ... led by cultural tsars such as theTate's SirNicholas Serota".[22] Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister,Kim Howells, an art school graduate, denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".[23]
In October 2004, theSaatchi Gallery told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate."[24] Following this,Charles Saatchi began to sell prominent works from his YBA (Young British Artists) collection.
Computer games date back to 1947,[25] although they did not reach much of an audience until the 1970s. Computer and video games include many kinds of art (the concept "art" itself is, as indicated, open to a variety of definitions). The graphics of a video game constitutedigital art,graphic art, and probablyvideo art. The original soundtrack of a video game constitutesmusic. But it remains a point of debate whether the video game itself should be considered an artwork, perhaps a form ofinteractive art orparticipatory art.
Film criticRoger Ebert, for example, went on record claiming that video games are not art, and for structural reasons will always be inferior to cinema, but then admitted his lack of knowledge in the area when he affirmed that he "will never play a game when there is a good book to be read or a good movie to be watched".[26] Video game designerHideo Kojima has argued that playing a videogame is not art, but games do have artistic style and incorporate art.[27][28][29] Video game designerChris Crawford argues that video games are art.[30]Esquire columnistChuck Klosterman also argues that video games are art.[31]
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